A Conversation With Michael Boyce Gillespie On Film Blackness and The Idea of Black Film - Film Quarterly

13/10/2018 A Conversation with Michael Boyce Gillespie on Film Blackness and the Idea of Black Film | Film Quarterly
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Published on September 16, 2016
A Conversation with Michael Boyce Gillespie on Film

Blackness and the Idea of Black Film
by Regina Longo
from Film Quarterly Fall 2016, Volume 70, Number 1
Michael Boyce Gillespie’s introduction to Film Blackness and the Idea of Black Film begins
with a series of questions that seem to be posed to reader and author alike, for he declares
https://filmquarterly.org/2016/09/16/a-conversation-with-michael-boyce-gillespie-on-film-blackness-and-the-idea-of-black-film/ 1/25
that this book is “driven by the belief that the idea of black lm is always a question, never
an answer” (16). The initial set of queries posed in “We Insist: The Idea of Black Film” do
indeed push the reader to think through some of the past and present iterations of
blackness in American culture and media, and ultimately to come to the conclusion that
there have always been multiple ways of being black, becoming black, performing
blackness, challenging blackness, embodying blackness, defying blackness, and
transcending the conventional understanding of blackness.
Gillespie explicates his chosen case studies through key themes that apply, in varying
degrees, to each chapter: the possibilities of black lm as speculative and ambivalent; the
transformation of race onscreen (but not only onscreen) from constitutive and cultural
ction to social fact; and the need for spectators to perform for themselves the active
labors of decoding the overdetermined visual signs of lm blackness. Finally, and perhaps
most importantly, he asks his readers to consider, “What if black lm is art and not the
visual transcription of the black lifeworld?” (157). Gillespie rightly demands that black lm
be considered as both art and discourse (14).
While Film Blackness cites some of the more mainstream black American lms that
emerged in the same moments and movements as those that Gillespie chooses to study in
depth—such as 1970s Blaxploitation, 1990s new black cinema, and noir—I nd that when I
teach introductory courses with an emphasis on the historical implications of race in
American cinema, his work is invaluable in pushing the discourses of blackness and lm,
not just blackness in lm. By presenting a series of lms that are less known to general
audiences, less studied and screened—but no less important, not least for his placing them
in dialogue with their mainstream counterparts—Gillespie is able to engage more deeply
with questions of blackness and antiblackness in visual culture. This approach locates the
moments that predominantly white critics have termed novelties and “explosions” and
leads the reader to rethink such labels. Gillespie achieves a generative intertextuality and
methodological bridge by synthesizing three elements in each chapter: close readings of
lms as varied as Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1975), Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992) and Medicine for
Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, 2008); the literary works of Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and
Albert Camus, as well as the theoretical work of Bakhtin, de Certeau, Fanon, and Manthia
Diawara (to name a few); and a speci c emphasis on the archives of critical reception to
these lms.
Chapter 2 on Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, Jr., 1989) is exceptional in its blend of
American lm cultural and industrial critique, as Gillespie works to demonstrate the limits
to phenotyping lm blackness. Chameleon Street is a social satire based on the story of the
real-life character William Douglass Street, who impersonated everyone from athletes to
doctors to lawyers to journalists, charming and conning hundreds while also making a
living—and upending some lives in the process. The lm’s Grand Jury Prize at Sundance
in 1990 marked the dawn of the “new black cinema,” but it seems to be one of the few lms
of this era that, despite festival success, did not fair as well with critics or audiences who
were evidently not ready for the lm’s implicit critique of what Gillespie calls the “black of
black lm” (73).
What, in fact, is this spectral signi er of lm blackness in the absence of any discussion of
lm whiteness? What did it mean for critics to repeatedly con ate Harris’s rendition of his
character Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr.) with Woody Allen’s earlier mockumentary Zelig
(1983), John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (1990), and Jennie Livingston’s documentary
Paris Is Burning (1990)? Gillespie de ly weaves together the facts of the lm’s production
and reception to reveal how the establishment, simply because race was involved, sidelined
through mislabeling a lm that demanded to be seen as a work of art in its own right.
Chameleon Street is multilayered and complex, both in terms of the larger societal structures
and hierarchies that it confronts and at the level of the relationship between lm as art and
lm as social commentary. While Coonskin hit the viewer over the head with a hammer
from start to nish, Gillespie foregrounds Chameleon Street as a lm that both ushered in
the 1990s black lm explosion and imploded in its wake, demonstrating just how many
options there are in thinking through, seeing, and transcending blackness, beyond simply
embodying it.
Ironically yet e ectively, in Chapter 3, “Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything),” Gillespie

advances his argument for a bodiless lm blackness through an in-depth examination of
classical noir, the genre that he notes is best characterized by “its consistency as a racialized
mode of white masculinities in crisis” (84). Let’s face it, every ethnicity, gender, and race is
a foil to white male hetero-normative narrative authority in classic noir. And yet, Gillespie
is able to upend the pessimism, fatalism, and deviance inherent in the genre when he
posits the noir lm Deep Cover against what he calls the incomplete thesis of James
Naremore’s seminal study of lm noir, More Than Night, which “neglects that the history of
the idea [of noir] is very much about the crossing of manufactured borders, gender
trouble, and racial ambiguity” (86). For Gillespie, Deep Cover, like Chameleon Street, provides
a di erent conceptual frame through which to think through the potentialities of black
lm and lm blackness, as well as blackness and lm. He questions repeatedly whether the
medium of lm should even be considered a window or mirror to blackness, while
recognizing that the noir vernacular to which Deep Cover gives voice exists alongside the
power and privilege of classical noir that sees only black, never blackness.
In Gillespie’s history, he questions prevailing trends that tend toward labeling a lm, a
lmmaker, or a movement in order to control it in a world where reductivism and
conventionalism rule. Gillespie’s research and writing are intrepid as he challenges these
ways of thinking. Further, his chosen objects of study re ect a resolute awareness of the
ways in which blackness and antiblackness are constantly performed in lm, literature, art,
the public sphere, and even in the more intimate space of the domestic sphere. In a world
in which producers, festival organizers, critics, pundits, and scholars continuously
overdetermine and instrumentalize works by black artists, insisting on their constitutive
representation of a predetermined de nition of blackness, Gillespie reminds his readers
that there are myriad other ways of enacting and expressing black culture, many of which
have yet to be realized, or imagined.
Regina Longo: Can you share your process in choosing the discrete texts for your case
studies to ensure a particular discursivity that opens the reader up to new ways of
imagining the “art of blackness”?
Michael Boyce Gillespie: Sure. Film Blackness is part of the work that I have been doing to
map out new critical investments in the art of blackness. It represents the rst step in a
series of projects devoted to enactments of black visual and expressive culture. What
pushed me to begin the work on the idea of black lm was registering how this cinema was
o en being measured in terms of delity or totalizing correspondence to the social
category of race. I value critical theory as a tool for thinking about the arts and it seemed
to me that less appropriate tools were being used to study this brand of cinema, tools that
appeared to have little value for art except as a corroboration of a predetermined thesis
about race. Furthermore, I didn’t identify with the tacit attitude that the idea of black lm
was not rigorous study, or that it was too fragile, just a social science exercise (“…of the
black experience”), or a marginal practice in contradistinction to the core principles of
cinema studies.
The book is about being discursively minded in engaging the idea of black lm. The book
accounts for some of my ambivalences, pleasures, and politics about black cinephilia as
lm blackness became the term that best represented how I wanted to think and write
about the idea of black lm. The rst step was grounding the project in a suspension of any
insistence on social fact or truth or identitarian claims about cinema. I don’t care for
thinking about cinema and spectatorship in the teachable-moment terms of holding hands
with strangers in the dark while humming “Kumbaya.” I want to be disrupted, challenged,
and engaged. I particularly don’t want to be patronized by how a lm can be said to
embody the black lifeworld. Besides, if I had to choose an art to do that kind of impossible
wish-ful llment work of embodying or “truly” re ecting black folks, it sure as hell
wouldn’t be cinema.
The next step was mapping out the idea of black lm in relationship to other practices and
disciplines by considering collateral questions and methodologies of the art of blackness
across elds, queries that shi ed the emphasis from what is it to what does it do. In this way,
I chose lms that intersected with my central interests in issues of blackness, visuality,
narrativity, and historiography. I wanted a range of works that o ered interdisciplinary
possibility, as my understanding and appreciation of cinema has always entailed a
devotion to considering other arts and complementary scholarship on black visual and
expressive culture. All of the ideas I develop across the four chapters (the racial grotesque,
black performativity, noir modalities of blackness, and quiet becoming) are tied to a
processing of them. In other words, every chapter represents the devising of a critical
circuit that, to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall, centers on “what is this black in this black
lm?”
Longo: You draw the reader into this critical circuit immediately with your rst chapter,
“Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin and the Racial Grotesque,” discussing the controversial
Coonskin, which was condemned by many black Americans. You close this chapter with a
quote from Darius James, who observes that Coonskin “pukes the iconographic bile of
racist culture back in its stupid, bloated face,” and demands that the culture “deal with it”
(49). Do you think Ralph Bakshi could have made a di erent kind of lm that asked the
same questions and forced the same confrontations, in 1975, about the depth of
American’s antiblack visual culture?
Gillespie: I rst saw Coonskin when I was eleven. My mother is from Starkville, Mississippi,
and she would always take me down there, from Massachusetts, during the summers. One
day, I was chosen to nd a movie in the video store for everyone to watch because I was the
oldest of a group of a dozen cousins. As I walked the aisles, I stumbled across the image of
a black rabbit in a white Super y suit with a gun and a scowl. While we were watching it, my
cousins walked and crawled away from the room until by the end I was the only one le .
When it ended, I rewound the tape and watched it again. What struck me then and
continues to strike me today about the lm is its severe provocation of the history of
American popular culture and its antiblack in ections. The lm most immediately became
my gateway to comix and the history of American animation.
Bakshi’s immediate target was Walt Disney and his egregious pet project, the 1946 lm
adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris’s Song of the South. But, by targeting Disney and
American animation/comics with a comic touch, Bakshi also indicts the antiblack visual
culture traces that can be found throughout the history of American popular culture.
People want to say “I don’t see that” or “I didn’t feel that” or “this is a sign of my heritage,
not hate.” It’s a privilege to be this willfully ignorant, to declare oneself the de nitive
arbiter of truth and meaning. A brutally challenging and clever lm, Coonskin does not
bene t from representational binaries of positive/negative.
I don’t care whether people are upset or disturbed by the lm. That’s the whole point of it.
You’re supposed to be incited by it and possibly feel seditious. If you want to feel good,
then watch Song of the South and enjoy being complicit with the very same regimes of
antiblackness and white supremacy on which it thrives. Moreover, Coonskin was made
possible by the enabling force of the Black Consciousness Movement in that the ideas of
that period are evident in the pop distillation that became the Blaxploitation cycle.
Ralph Ellison wrote: “For man without myth is Othello with Desdemona gone: chaos
descends, faith vanishes and superstitions prowl in the mind.”1 In this same vein, Toni
Morrison proposes: “My project is an e ort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object
to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers;
from the serving to the served.”2 Both of these citations deeply informed my argument in
the book for how the lm shi s the focus from the static denotation of stereotypicality to
an ambivalent practice that targets the cultural and aesthetic mechanisms of antiblack
visual culture.
In addition, I spent a lot of time thinking about the racial grotesque through Ishmael
Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo [1972], George Wolfe’s The Colored Museum [1987], Darius James’s
Negrophobia [1993], and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled [2000]. Finally, I went through a period of
immersing myself in the art of Robert Colescott, Betye Saar, Kara Walker, Lyle Ashton
Harris, and Michael Ray Charles. There were many other artists but these in particular
began to direct my conception of the racial grotesque and inform my reading of Coonskin.
In the end, it was when I read Mikhail Bakhtin that I really began to write all this out. I’ve
always believed in the lm beyond the respectability promise of positive and negative
images. The lm’s deadly in its cheekiness. It baits you to revile it. But I believe that the
real a ective force of the lm lies in its function as a visual historiography of American
popular culture with an attention to the visualizing mechanisms of antiblackness and white
pleasure. It can never be unwatched.
Longo: Can you discuss what you think active spectatorship should or could look like in
2016 as audiences continue to be confronted with images of antiblackness, but where
there is also a “new” black consciousness, new responses to antiblackness, and new forms
of blackness being represented and embodied?
Gillespie: I’m interested in the rendering of blackness or how black visual and expressive
culture stages race not just as impermeable fact, but as multidimensional and
multidiscursive. And I’m arguing against embodiment as an acceptable way to discuss the
cinema. Film blackness is very much a methodological prioritizing of cinema’s evincing of
visuality, textuality, and historiography. I am motivated by capacities, not a reinscription
of essential values.
Take the past year as an example. I’ve been thinking about a cluster of work that includes
Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq [2015], Stephen Winter’s Jason and Shirley [2015], Josh Locy’s Hunter
Gatherer [2016], recent work by Kevin Jerome Everson, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits [2015],
and Francis Bodomo’s “Everybody Dies!” segment from collective:unconscious [2016]. Each is
a distinct staging of lm blackness, each a distinct enactment of black visual and expressive
culture. The range of negotiations and engagements with blackness that this work
exempli es requires more than the distilling crush of black cinema=black people.
Each of these works requires a distinctly consequential account for its respective practice: a
reanimation of the musical in the key of satire; a critique and reappraisal of lm history
and black queer performativity; the blues portraiture of quotidian love and struggle; a
proli c artmaking practice devoted to black experimentalizing and gestures; a meditation

on dance, black girl becoming, and black girl magic; and a cable access show for children
hosted by “Ripa the Reaper” from the Department of Black Death. In my conclusion, I
write of the book’s urgency and my hope that the idea of black lm will carry on as an
irreconcilable discourse that will continue to defy, challenge, and enliven our sense of art,
history, and culture. I want to push for an understanding of the idea of black lm that can
account for new future assessments of the past.
Longo: By Chapter 2, you are in fact pushing your reader toward this understanding in
your juxtaposition of Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s Chameleon Street with the writings of Tommy
Lott’s “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema.” The potential for black
cinema that you address through theories of performativity, intention, and genre push
beyond Lott’s wish for “the future composition of black cinema” (78). You argue that
Lott’s politics limited his dream of a black cinema, and instrumentalized blackness.
Gillespie: Yes, Lott’s work is valuable but he ultimately does cap the possibilities. Chameleon
Street taught me a lesson about black lm historiography. I rst saw it in 1990 at the
National Black Arts festival in Atlanta not long a er its Grand Jury Prize victory at the
Sundance Film Festival. There was a buzz surrounding the lm programming that year, a
palpable sense that work being screened was a showcase of what was literally an avant-
garde, or advanced guard, of an upcoming crop of black lms. Of course that upcoming
crop would be the “black lm explosion” of 1991, the beginning of a “new black cinema.”
As I wrote, there is no de nitive or singular explanation for what has been marked as the
lm’s failure. I adore the lm and sought to redeem it from the compounded and collusive
sense of failure it endured as a result of critical inattentiveness, poor distribution,
independent lm cronyism, unfortunate programming choices by exhibitors, antiblack
racism, or white supremacy. The lm failed to be appreciated as an art lm, independent
lm, American lm, or black lm. Furthermore, my focus on the dissociative sense of
black performativity that the lm enacts was inspired by the cinema, literature, and
scholarship on passing because I read the lm as a disobedient conception of the politics of
passing. I seek out challenging moments of lm blackness because they compel a dead
reckoning with the impropriety of limits with a dedication to addressing uncommon
multitudes.
Along these same lines, the decision to include a chapter on Bill Duke’s 1992 lm Deep
Cover [Chapter 3] grew out of my interest in Chester Himes, lm noir of the 1990s, and
contemporary scholarship on noir (e.g., Manthia Diawara, Jonathan Eburne, Christopher
Breu, Megan Abbott, Eric Lott). With blackness and noir in mind, I began to develop a
sense of noir modalities of blackness to avoid the nomenclature of “black noir” or “neo-
noir” and examine genre as a process and, again, not a xed category. Film noir matters
more, to borrow Naremore’s language, as “the history of an idea.” I had always thought I
would write a chapter that focused on Deep Cover, Devil in a Blue Dress [Carl Franklin, 1995],
and Suture [Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 1993]. I used to teach the lms together in
order to demonstrate a range of ways of understanding noir modalities of blackness. But as
I began to write on Deep Cover it became a rich enough object to focus on exclusively. For
my purposes, the lm poses some substantial distinctions for considering lm blackness
through the lens of genre theory and the deep inspiration of Chester Himes’s Harlem
detective novels, especially Real Cool Killers and Plan B.
Longo: As you state in relation to Deep Cover, at a certain point, you have to limit your
objects of study when there are such rich archives to explore. While your book is a study
that thinks through and complicates understandings of black masculinity, in our
conversations you and I have also talked about your appreciation, recognition, and study
of black women lmmakers and the representation of black womanist or feminist ideas
in cinema. Can you share with FQ’s readers some of what you found in the archives of
black women lmmakers that didn’t make it into this book?
Gillespie: Sure. One of the themes running throughout the book is how to account for a
necessary complementarity and incompatibility surrounding issues of politics, pleasure,
and a politics of pleasure surrounding the idea of black lm. I suppose this line of
questioning and self-inquiry began when I rst read Pearl Cleage’s Mad at Miles: A
Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth as an undergraduate. Later on, spending time at Women Make
Movies and Third World Newsreel most immediately becomes a vital in uence on my
teaching. Teaching and writing about Leah Gilliam’s Now Pretend [1992] and Sapphire and
the Slave Girl [1995] helped me to appreciate why the idea of black lm demanded a
forestalling of identitarian tendencies. In that same vein, Camille Billops and James Hatch’s
Suzanne Suzanne [1982] in uenced my thinking about blackness and seditious form, or
what happens when a lm appears to be classically structured but in truth productively
devises an epistemological unraveling. Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere [2012] was a lm
that I cycled through o en as I was writing the Medicine for Melancholy [2008] chapter. The
lm’s rich a ectivity in terms of its temporality or issues of carceral time along with its
pacing of black desire helped me to really consider why I needed to be very clear to not
entertain any conjecture about “Jo” being a post-race or deracinated woman who needs to
be saved by a righteous brother like “Micah.”
Longo: In Chapter 4, “Black Maybe: Medicine for Melancholy, Place, and Quiet Becoming,”
there is a great sense of release. You really leave things open in terms of the potentials of
blackness and lm blackness, and return the reader to the questions with which you
opened the book. I admire your ability to ground your ideas in case studies, to sit with “a
mediation on romance, place and ruin” (155), and to ultimately recognize the potentials
of an untethered, immaterial, and bodiless black lm (157).
Gillespie: Thanks. I’m really happy that that lm found its way into the book. The book
was supposed to close with a focus on Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog [1999] and issues of genre,
hip-hop modernism, art cinema, and sonic visuality. I remain deeply fascinated by the
proposition of an art lm devoted to dead codes of hip-hop, the samurai, noir, and
masculinity, with blackness as the binding rmament. But as I dra ed that chapter it
became clear that it was for another book. I began thinking about Barry Jenkins’s Medicine
for Melancholy as the concluding chapter not long a er it opened in New York City in 2008
following its premiere at South by Southwest. A student of mine at The New School saw it
and asked me, “Do you know how to make a mumblecore lm interesting?” I said, “No,
how do you make a mumblecore lm interesting?” and he answered, “You talk about race.”
Now, while I understand how the techniques of that lm movement were staged in
Medicine, the lm is ultimately something greater than that one element. It has a sense of
place, quiet, black becoming, and desire. And, it o ered a perfect intersection of the work
of the other chapters on a ect, visual historiography, performativity, and modalities. It
became the perfect culmination for the book’s arc.
Longo: What resonates from the outset in Film Blackness is the fact that you resist an
investment in the idea of black lm along a historiographic model that traces American
blackness as represented in cinema from slavery to freedom. I think that this book will
be invaluable in shaping a di erent pedagogy for teaching black lm. Can you share
your vision for where you think the eld is going, and what a black lm pedagogy could
look like?
Gillespie: By design, I wanted to be careful to avoid a progressive modeling of black lm

historiography that would suggest a settled past and a future tied to a de nitive sense of a
victory achieved, such that a slavery-to-freedom conceit suggests, something that would
suggest an arc: that once upon a time there was a man named Oscar Micheaux and then
end with 12 Years a Slave [Steve McQueen, 2013] winning an Oscar, or Obama watching
Selma [Ava DuVernay, 2014] in the White House. In this way, I’m thinking of the victorious
rhetoric of Karen Grigsby Bates’s “They’ve Gotta Have Us” in the New York Times Magazine.3
Recently, lm historians like Allyson Field, Cara Caddoo, and Miriam Petty have put out
really important work that pushes for a vital rethinking of our pedagogical investments in
the idea of black lm by reanimating the past and the implications that this history holds
for the future. Overall, I would like to think that the study of black lm will continue to
move towards assuming its place in the conceptual eld of black visual and expressive
culture.
Longo: Speaking of expressive culture, what artists, lmmakers, and writers are

inspiring your next projects?
Gillespie: I am inspired by a number of cinema, literature, and visual culture scholars. The
work I have been exposed to through the American Studies Association and Black
Portraitures conferences has had the most signi cant impact on my scholarship. My future
projects include work on Kevin Jerome Everson, Edgar Arceneaux, Terence Nance, Khalil
Joseph, the proposition of post-9/11 music, the visual culture of black death, afrofuturism,
black zone cinema, adaptations and Civil Rights America, edited collections on Black
Cinema Aesthetics and Chester Himes criticism, and a book project, Music of My Mind:
Blackness and Sonic Visuality. My goal is to keep doing the work of thinking about black
visual and expressive culture, the work to understand how the art of blackness continues to
defy, challenge, and enliven our sense of art, history, and culture.
Notes
1. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow
and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 41.
2. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Press, 1992), 90.
3. Karen Grigsby Bates, “They’ve Gotta Have Us,” New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1991, 18.
Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

Michael Boyce Gillespie
Duke University Press, 2016
$23.95 paper, $84.95 cloth, 248 pages
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13/10/2018 A Conversation with Michael Boyce Gillespie on Film Blackness and the Idea of Black Film | Film Quarterly

ABOUT ADVERTISE CONTACT SUBMIT SUBSCRIBE

Published on September 16, 2016

A Conversation with Michael Boyce Gillespie on Film

from Film Quarterly Fall 2016, Volume 70, Number 1

Ironically yet e ectively, in Chapter 3, “Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything),” Gillespie

proli c artmaking practice devoted to black experimentalizing and gestures; a meditation

Gillespie: By design, I wanted to be careful to avoid a progressive modeling of black lm

Longo: Speaking of expressive culture, what artists, lmmakers, and writers are

Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

An Introduction One Step Ahead: A Winter 2017: Volume 71,

PREVIOUS POST NEXT POST

© 2016 The Regents of the University of California

Major funding for Film Quarterly is provided by the JustFilms

LIsten to Film Quarterly Podcasts on

FOLLOW BLOG VIA EMAIL

Click to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by

Join 677 other followers

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